An optical engine is a multi-chip module (MCM) that may include one or more silicon photonic dies that are electrically coupled to one or more silicon electronic dies. An optical engine may be packaged onto a single unifying substrate to facilitate its use as a single multi-chip module.
Known methods of packaging optical engines involve packaging optical engines one at a time. A known packaging method includes the steps of: placing one or more silicon photonic dies and one or more silicon electronic dies in close proximity to one another on a substrate; creating electrical interconnects between the one or more silicon photonic dies and the one or more silicon electronic dies; attaching an optical fiber core to each of the silicon photonic dies; and encapsulating the substrate, the one or more silicon photonic dies, the one or more silicon electronic dies, and the electrical interconnects to create an optical engine package. Encapsulation also protects the electrical interconnects from damage and potential electrical shorting.
Silicon photonics were developed to take advantage of the scalable manufacturing offered by silicon wafer processing. While standard silicon wafer processing can effectively produce optical components for optical engines, the back-end assembly process is unsuitable for forming packages using these silicon-based optical components because the step of attaching an optical fiber core to the silicon photonic dies before encapsulation renders a resulting partially completed multi-chip module incompatible with standard assembly processing flows.
Improvements in methods of assembling and packaging optical engines are therefore desirable.